


omnia mutantur, nihil interit

by Chrome



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Alternate Universe - X-Men Fusion, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character's Name Spelled as Viktor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Injuries, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Young Victor Nikiforov, is that a tag?, the early 2000s
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-07-12 14:05:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15996740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrome/pseuds/Chrome
Summary: Now, Viktor Nikiforov is dead, and mutants and humans are on the verge of war. Fifteen years ago, Yuuri Katsuki is stumbling backwards into an unfamiliar world, trying to find his husband in a silver-haired teenager and a better future in the disjointed chaos of the past.(aDays of Future Past-inspired X-Men AU)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [owlishann](https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlishann/gifts).



> Thank you to the wonderful [Alice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterpile) for the beta help and to, as always, [Allison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stammiviktor) who is somehow supportive of my continual ongoing disaster of a life.
> 
> This fic is for the Viktuuri Summer Loving Gift Exchange, for the prompt "time travel". I hope you enjoy your gift!

The wall of Yuuri’s lab looked like most university laboratories: a long black counter, two sinks, an emergency decontamination shower (standard issue, even though nothing that Yuuri worked with was likely to do more than cause a stain). There were cabinets filled with textbooks and journals, half of which were old even before Yuuri had begun his PhD, and below them shelves and shelves of glassware, most of which were newer, although there were dingier sets pushed further back behind the gleaming graduated cylinders and beakers and flasks.

Yuuri was lost in thought, looking at the wall without really seeing it, when it rippled and warped and suddenly through it fell Yuri Plisetsky. Yuuri winced instinctively, but Yuri didn’t solidify until he was well into the room, feet hitting the ground in front of the counter, and so both the glassware and Yuri were spared.

Yuuri breathed out a sigh of relief even as the annoyance welled up — Yuri knew better than to phase so close to the glassware. “Yurio, what did I say about coming through that wall?” he said.  He was only halfway through the sentence when he started to process what he was seeing, though the rest of the words fell out of his mouth regardless, his brain temporarily disconnected from his body.

Yuri was breathing hard, inhaling and exhaling in sharp gasps like he’d been running for a long time. His hair was a mess, his clothes badly rumpled, but that wasn’t what had stopped Yuuri in his tracks. What had stopped Yuuri was the blood. It was on Yuri’s hands, his arms, staining his sleeves, the front of his shirt. It was on his shoes, too — as he stumbled forward, he left marks in red on the floor.

“Oh my god,” Yuuri breathed. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Yuri managed. He finally looked up; his face was tearstained, eyes red-rimmed and snot dripping from his nose. “Yuuri. Yuuri, they shot him.”

“Who?” Yuuri said automatically, even though he knew,  _ he knew,  _ even before Yuri said it.

“Viktor,” Yuri said. “They shot Viktor.”

\---

Yuuri had met Yuri the summer after he met Viktor. He probably would have met him sooner, if Viktor had had his way, because Viktor had taken to Yuuri instantly, wanted him to meet everyone, wanted to absorb Yuuri entirely into his family even though Yuuri was a human and every one of them were mutants. Yuuri had resisted not because he didn’t want it — he wanted it badly, had wanted Viktor in some way long before Viktor had walked in during his office hours one day, unannounced, unheralded (to this day Yuuri had no idea how he’d even known when they were held) and said he was so excited, he’d been waiting so long to meet Yuuri.

Yuuri had just stared at him, because however long Viktor had been waiting, Yuuri was sure he’d been waiting longer. He’d been waiting since he saw Viktor at age sixteen, long-haired and incandescent, snow swirling bright around him, as bright white as the bandage on his neck where the Mutant Underground had ripped out the government microchip. Yuuri had known then that no one who shone as bright as Viktor, who smiled like that, could be a monster, whatever the anti-mutant propaganda said.

“We’re just people,” the silver-haired boy on the television had said, steadily, to everyone who shoved a microphone in his face. “We’re no different. We’re no better. We need to work together, to understand what this is.  I would like to ask you, all of you, to try and understand us.”

It was a lot of grace from a teenager, particularly one still sporting the marks from his time in the hands of the government. But the Mutant Underground had rallied behind the idea, and eventually behind Viktor, and Yuuri grew up watching Viktor on television, reading articles, with Viktor’s request  _ try and understand us  _ ringing in his ears.

It maybe wasn’t quite what Viktor had meant, but when Yuuri was standing in his office almost fifteen years later with his PhD in genetics on the wall behind him, his book on the X-gene lying on the desk, and Viktor Nikiforov standing in the doorway, Yuuri couldn’t really say he’d gotten it wrong.

And up until the moment when Yuri flew through the wall dripping in blood, Yuuri would have said that moment was the most surprised he’d ever been in his life. It was the good sort of surprise then, though, the sort of surprise that Viktor liked.

This was the horrible sort, the sort that twisted his gut into knots, that made the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“What do you mean?” Yuuri said, crossing the room and gripping Yuri by the elbows. The cloth of his shirt was damp with blood under Yuuri’s fingers.

“They shot Viktor,” Yuri sobbed, and flung himself the rest of the way into Yuri’s arms. Yuuri was momentarily stunned — Yuri didn’t like hugs — and then clutched him tightly, ignoring the way the red stained the white of his lab coat. “Oh, my god. There’s going to be a war, Yuuri.”

“No,” Yuuri said reflexively. He hadn’t even gotten as far as the implications of  _ they shot Viktor, Viktor, his Viktor. _  “The government?”

“I don’t know,” Yuri said. “There’s — JJ’s saying that it’s the government, that it’s got to be the government, but — I don’t know.”

“A war,” Yuuri repeated. A war between humans and mutants, the very thing that Viktor had worked for so many years to prevent, the very thing that Yuuri had hoped his research would aid them in avoiding.  _ We’re not so different,  _ it said in the book that was still on his desk, empty words in the face of something like this. He had the strangest sense that he was trapped in a nightmare, that any minute now he was going to wake up and all his fears were going to evaporate into mist, Viktor leaning across the bed to look at him with concern in his eyes.

Oh, god,  _ Viktor. _

“Viktor,” Yuuri said. “Is he-”

Yuri shook his head. “Seung-gil got him out of there, but-” he looked at Yuuri with wide eyes. He looked so young, Yuuri thought. “There was so much blood.”

“Do they know you’re here?” Yuuri asked, trying hard not to picture it, to block out the image of all the red splattered on the floor and on Yuri pouring out of Viktor.

“No,” Yuri said. “They just- Yakov said, go somewhere safe.”

Under other circumstances, Yuuri might have found it flattering, that when  asked to go to safety, Yuri came to him. Now, though, the rush of love was muted by fear, by the idea of a coming war and the uncertainty of Viktor, his Viktor…

He wanted to sit down on the floor of the lab, right there, and cry, but he couldn’t. Besides, it wasn’t worth crying yet, not when there was still a chance — no. Not when he knew that Viktor was going to be okay, that Viktor was going to come back to him. “Let’s go home,” Yuuri said. “You can change. We’ll call Yakov.”

Yuri nodded; there were fresh tears welling up in his eyes, and Yuuri could only imagine that his silence was an effort to conceal it. Yuuri didn’t say anything, just cleaned up everything that couldn’t sit overnight and then wet a paper towel to wipe up the blood from the floor where Yuri had stood. Then he locked up the lab and led him out to the car.

The drive back was tense and quiet. Yuuri’s grip was tight on the steering wheel. After a few moments, Yuri reached out and flicked on the radio.

_ “No group has yet claimed responsibility for the assassination, but Jean-Jacques Leroy, better known as ‘King JJ’, is blaming the US government, claiming that Nikiforov was targeted for his mutant activism. The US government has denied responsibility and suggested that a mutant terrorist faction could be responsible, including Leroy’s group, the Mutant Kingdom. The Mutant Kingdom has taken a more radical stance than the Mutant Underground, suggesting that human and mutant interests cannot necessarily be reconciled. The Mutant Underground has yet to be reached for comment-” _

Yuri hit the radio button again, plunging them back into silence. Yuuri had to slam on the brake at the red light moments before they would have careened into the intersection. “The assassination,” he said. “Do you think-“

“No,” Yuri said. “No. They must- they’ve got it wrong. They’ve got it wrong, they’re wrong.”

“Call Yakov,” Yuuri said. He couldn’t imagine waiting another second now that the idea was in his head. “Call Yakov right now.”

“I don’t have a phone,” Yuri said.

“Use mine.” Yuuri nodded at his cell phone in the center console. Yuri picked it up. The blood had mostly dried on his hands, now, so he didn’t leave fingerprints, just little brownish-red flecks coming off around the edges of his fingernails.

Yuuri had Yakov’s number in his phone, where Viktor had programmed it in,  _ just in case.  _ There had never been an ‘in case’; he had exchanged four texts total with Yakov, all sent by Viktor when his own phone wasn’t readily in reach. Yuri pressed the contact and put it on speaker, letting it ring into the quiet of the car over the low rumble of the engine.

It rang twice and then Yakov picked up. “Katsuki?”

“It’s me,” Yuri said. “I went to- I’m with Katsudon.”

“Good,” Yakov said. “Keep your head down.”

“What’s going on?” Yuri demanded. “Is there going to be a war?”

“I don’t know,” Yakov answered. He sounded so, so tired. “Leroy’d like one.”

“We can’t,” Yuri said, casting a glance at Yuuri. “We-”

“Where’s Viktor?” Yuuri interrupted. “Which hospital? I know Seung-gil teleports but we can fly out-”

“He’s gone,” Yakov said. There was something quiet and empty in his voice. “I’m sorry, Katsuki.”

The words didn’t register at first. He thought  _ oh, Yakov sounds tired  _ and  _ fuck JJ Leroy  _ and  _ I wonder how many frequent flier miles I have saved  _ and then all the mundane tangled thoughts left at once.

“No,” he gasped out the word like he’d been punched in the gut.

“I’m sorry,” Yakov said again. When Yuuri looked over, Yuri was sitting mute and wide-eyed in the passenger seat, eyes filling up with tears all over again. They were only blocks from home, but all of a sudden Yuuri couldn’t remember how to drive. He pulled over and snapped the car into park on the side of the road.

“No,” he said. There was a roaring in his ears. “No, no, no.”

All of a sudden he was sobbing, his whole body shaking, slumped against the steering wheel. His entire mind was screaming against him, rebelling against a fact that could not, should not be true.

He cried for a long time. At some point, Yuri unbuckled his seat belt and crawled over the center console, curling up against Yuuri and crying into his shoulder. At some point one of them hung up, or maybe Yakov did.

Sometimes when Yuuri cried, it was cathartic. It tended to be an anxious response, an outpouring of disappointment or fear. He’d cried before his thesis presentation. He’d cried after it, too, when his faculty advisor greeted him with, “Congratulations, Dr. Katsuki.” But those experiences always left him feeling lighter, like a weight had been lifted from his chest.

When he finally stopped crying, he didn’t feel any better. He just felt cold and empty.  _ Vitya’s gone. _

Yuri sniffled into his sleeve. “That stupid old man,” he gasped. “He can’t- he can’t be-”

“I know,” Yuuri said. He felt bad that he couldn’t provide any sort of support to Yuri. He was only a teenager, he’d been there when it happened, had already been a mess when he phased through the wall and the news that everything he was afraid of had come to pass couldn’t have made the situation any easier. But despite his own shortcomings, he was relieved that he wasn’t alone, that at least there was someone else who loved Viktor with him. “We should go home,” he said, finally.

“Okay,” Yuri swiped at his face and clambered back over into the passenger seat.

Yuuri drove. He was surprised by how easy it was, how familiar everything felt, the last few blocks, the turn into the driveway. He’d half-expected the world to have warped around him, to have transformed into something as nightmarish and unfamiliar as Yakov’s words on the phone, as the idea of  _ Vitya, gone. _ But it was just the neighborhood, the quiet neighborhood, the blue rose bushes that he and Viktor had planted out front.

The memory sprang up, unbidden, Viktor cradling the pot in his arms in the kitchen. “Genetically modified,” he had said, brightly. “You don’t get anything like them in nature. Aren’t they beautiful?”

Yuuri had examined the little plant. It only had one bud, then, deep and blue, like someone had dipped it in ink. He’d seen blue roses before, but only cut ones, the white ones that had been dyed. He’d never seen one growing. “Like your eyes,” he had said.

“They’re mutants,” Viktor had said. “Just like me!”

“We should do the whole yard with them,” Yuuri had replied, staring out at the turned-over soil, and Viktor had beamed.

So now they had four. They had bought two, that first spring, and then they had grown well and so they had planted two more. For a few years they’d been lopsided, two big and two small, but between the growth of the little ones and the pruning, they were all the same size by now, heavy with blue blossoms.

He was still thinking  _ they,  _ Yuuri thought with something like horror as he stared out the windshield at the flowers. Still thinking that he wasn’t alone.

The house had felt like a good destination when he’d said it, in the laboratory. It was somewhere safe, somewhere warm. Yuri had a drawer full of clothes in the guest bedroom. He could get clean, they could eat something. But now he wondered if he shouldn’t have shoved Yuri under the decomp shower after all. Every step he took into the house was another memory of Viktor, Viktor frowning over the paint swatches at the hardware store, Viktor sprawled across the couch, Viktor smiling at him from over the sink, washing the breakfast dishes.

There was a jingle of a collar, the click of dog nails on the tile, as Makkachin came into the room, sniffing at them, snuffling at the blood on Yuri’s shoes. Maybe it was merely the raw metallic reek of it, like meat; maybe it was that she smelled Viktor in it. Yuuri recoiled at the thought and shooed her away, then helped Yuri get his shoes off after kicking off his own.

“Go shower,” Yuuri said. “I’ll- clean these.”

“You can get rid of them,” Yuri shuddered. “I don’t want them.”

Yuuri nodded, but once Yuri was gone he ducked into the kitchen and wiped them down with paper towels anyway. They had a plastic-y finish that made it easy to clean, but even once the red was gone, he wondered if Yuri would be able to bring himself to wear them again. He set them on the rack by the door anyway and then turned to look at himself in the hallway mirror.

He still had his lab coat on, splattered with the bloody residue from Yuri. His face was puffy and red from crying. He averted his gaze and shed the coat, dropping it into the washing machine. When Yuuri was done showering he’d wash it all together, see if any of it could be saved.

Unlike Viktor. Viktor, who was gone,  _ gone. _

He sunk to the floor next to the washing machine and buried his face in his hands. He felt rather than saw Makkachin approach, the wet nose pushing against his palm and then her cloud of soft fur, worming her way into his arms.

He sat there for a long while, suspended in a quiet state of disbelief. He thought about crying again, because he wasn’t done grieving, not nearly, but the tears wouldn’t come. He just couldn’t make it feel true, sitting here in the home they had made together.

Any minute now, Viktor was going to come through the door. Any minute now, there would be the click of his keys as he tossed them onto the counter, the soft huff of his laugh as Makkachin butted against his knees. Any minute now, his footsteps, around the corner…

The footsteps that did come, eventually, were Yuri’s. He settled on the floor next to Yuuri in fresh clothes, his hair damp. Despite the shower, his face was still puffy and red, as though he’d been crying straight through it.

“This is so fucked up,” he said, choked.

“Yeah,” Yuuri said. ‘Fucked up’ wasn’t the wrong word for it, although it wasn’t quite the right one, either.  _ Surreal  _ was more like it. He had kissed Viktor goodbye the previous afternoon, when he  had left for the airport. They’d texted that morning, before Yuuri had started work in the lab. He’d thought about turning the television on, to see Viktor speak, but it wasn’t supposed to be anything new, anything Viktor hadn’t said before or Yuuri hadn’t seen, and it had been the middle of the day and so he hadn’t.

“I want to see,” Yuuri said, suddenly. He nudged Makkachin off his lap and stood up, guilt flickering at her quiet whine.

Yuri wasn’t normally much of a dog person, but he gripped her around the middle and hauled her into his lap. She was too big for it, but tolerant, and she only scrabbled a little before settling in around his knobbly knees. “Go watch, then,” he said, low. “I don’t need to see it again.” He tucked his face into Makkachin’s fur.

Yuuri knew better but he couldn’t not know, couldn’t not see it happen. It still felt fake as he googled it. It autofilled almost immediately, as soon as he typed ‘vik’.

_ viktor nikiforov dead  _ the search bar filled.

Yuuri sucked in a breath and clicked on the first Youtube link. It was good quality, news footage. Viktor was wearing a suit, smiling, eyes bright, answering a question. He could see Mila in the frame, a few paces behind, and Yakov in the back with his arms crossed.

“I think we’ve made big strides in the past few years — in Russia, too. To be home, here,” Viktor shook his head. “I would not have dared to come home, not so many years ago. To be back in the city where I grew up, it is a beautiful thing.”

“And do you think-”

Whatever the reporter had wanted to know if Viktor thought, Yuuri never found out, because suddenly Viktor was staggering, hand to his side. There was a gasp from the crowd, screams; the camera blurred and refocused, and then Yakov was next to Viktor, and Yuri ran up towards them, hands pressed to fabric blooming bright red, and then the camera lost focus again as people were shoved aside and the video ended in a blur of pavement.

Yuuri realized he was shaking. He pushed the cursor back, to the last moment Viktor was visible. He was still alive in the blurry image, his face screwed up with pain, half-covered by his hair.  In that last moment, his hand had curled into a fist and Yuuri could see ice forming at his fingertips. Yuuri pressed a hand to the screen, trying to reach through it, to reach through time and touch him, hold him,  _ save him _ .

He hit the back button. News articles were springing up, as recently as a minute ago, reporting Viktor’s death, the government’s statements, what JJ Leroy had said. He clicked one.

_ “King JJ” sets ultimatum — government takes responsibility for Nikiforov assassination or Mutant Kingdom declares war _

He hit the back button.

_ “Viktor wouldn’t want violence” — Mutant Underground calls for calm in aftermath of Nikiforov assassination _

Assassination was such an ugly, ugly word. Even  _ Nikiforov  _ felt odd, impersonal. They had talked about what they would do about names when they got married. Yuuri had been hesitant to change his — he was Dr. Katsuki or Professor Katsuki in his field, after all, and he’d always been a Katsuki, but Viktor was a public figure and it didn’t make sense for him to change his name, he’d thought.

Viktor had seen it differently. “I love your parents,” he’d said, plainly. “And I don’t have any family to offend. Of course I’d want to be a Katsuki.”

“Okay,” Yuuri had agreed. And so Viktor would be a Katsuki, in the spring.

Would have been a Katsuki, in the spring. Would never be anything again.

Yuuri choked on a sob, pressing his fist to his mouth. The gold of the ring was cold against his lips. He clicked back to the video and rewound it, pausing over and over again until he could find the last glimpse of Viktor’s matching ring, on the hand splayed over the fatal wound, trying futilely to keep the blood inside him.

He kissed his own ring, as though it meant anything, as though he could put his own thoughts into Viktor’s mind at his last moments, make sure he knew  _ you are loved _ .

The doorbell rang, startling him out of his thoughts. He set down his phone and trundled back through the kitchen, past Yuri who was still entangled with Makkachin on the floor, to the front door.

Seung-gil, Yakov, and Mila stood on the steps. Mila looked pale and red-eyed, Seung-gil as expressionless as ever. Yakov just looked grim.

Yuuri just looked at them. “I want his body.”

“Is Yuratchka here?” Yakov asked.

“Yes. I, I want- my family, we have a shrine…”

“We have an idea,” Mila said. “We have to talk to Yura. But if it works-”

“To Yura, and to you,” Yakov said. “After. Yes. Of course.”

“There’s going to be a war,” Yuri said, from behind him. His voice sounded hollow.

“I hope not,” said Yakov.

“Where is he?” Yuuri interrupted.

“With Giacometti,” Yakov said.

“Since we still don’t know who shot him,” Seung-gil said. “We thought it would be better.”

“When we thought he might still live,” Yakov said, bluntly. “Now we have only one chance, and it is not a good one. But Yura. Katsuki. I would not ask this of you if I did not believe it might work.”

“What might work?” Yuuri asked, because he couldn’t not ask. Because the alternative was the silence, was Yuri’s breathing too close behind him, just barely on the right side of steady. Was Viktor bleeding out in the space of moments, far away from Yuuri.

“We should come in,” Yakov said, and so Yuuri swung the door wider and stepped aside.

They came in. Yakov sat on the armchair, and Yuuri and Yuri and Mila on the couch, and Seung-gil perched awkwardly on the arm of the other armchair even though there was plenty of room, and once the room had fallen into a quiet grieving silence, Yakov explained, and as he spoke Yuuri felt something that he thought had permanently died inside him slowly, slowly come back to life.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri takes a trip back in time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to amazing [Alice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterpile) for beta-ing! The word "said" would be in this fic a lot more if not for her.
> 
> And thank you to everyone who left kudos and commented on the first chapter!

“I do not want to give you hope,” Yakov said flatly, looking around the room. “But there may be a way — I would not suggest it, if it did not seem as though war was inevitable.”

“What?” Yuri leaned forward, palms pressed flat to his knees. “Suggest what?”

“Yuratchka,” Yakov said. “Your power works by shoving aside particles, yes, by moving past them in a parallel plane without disturbing them.”

“Sure,” Yuri said, impatient.

“It is theoretically possible,” Yakov said, “That the same might be done with time.”

There was a full second of silence. Then: “Bullshit,” Yuri snapped.

“It is possible,” Yakov replied. “I will say nothing more than that.”

“You think I can go back in time,” Yuri said. “You think I can go back in time and save Vitya.”

“No,” Yakov said. “I think you could push someone else through. If you go — I do not think we could bring you back. Even then…” he shook his head. “It is an act of desperation, nothing more. I do not want to even suggest it. But if we do not, it is war.”

Silence fell around the room. There had been terrible tensions between mutants and humans for many years, Yuuri knew, but he did not remember it — by the time he was old enough to follow politics, to understand, there was Viktor and talk of understanding and peace. Yuri, he knew, had realized he was a mutant in a world that was more accepting, that was beginning to talk about the X-gene as a step forward and mutations as gifts. Mila, too, was barely old enough to know.

But Yakov would remember the way things used to be, and he looked more haunted than Yuuri had ever seen him.

“Can you do that?” Yuuri turned to Yuri. “Yurio?”

“Fuck,” Yuri said. “Or die trying, I guess.” He picked at the edge of his nail as though there was still blood on it, even though his skin had already gone pink with the heat of the shower and the force of his scrubbing. “Yeah. I can do it.”

“I’m going,” Yuuri said. It was a terrible thing, hope: sharp and bright and hot and cold all at once in his chest, the heaviest and lightest his heart had ever felt. “I’m going.”

“It will be dangerous,” Yakov warned. “For you especially, Katsuki. We would not blame you if-“

“Now,” Yuri cut him off. “Let’s do it now.”

“Now,” Yakov said, and he sounded a little stunned, like he truly hadn’t thought that this was going to come to fruition.

“War’s coming,” Seung-gil added. “Why wait?”

“War,” Mila said. “What would that look like?”

Seung-gil shrugged. He was young too, Yuuri realized. Yuuri was the second-oldest person in the room. Most mutants were young, Viktor’s age or below, Yuuri thought.

Most mutants older than Viktor, Yuuri thought, had not survived.

“Now,” Yuuri said. “If Yuri can do it now — I think we should do it now.”

“Are you sure?” It was Mila who asked this time; it overlapped with Yuri’s words.

“I can do it.”

“Yes,” Yuuri answered Mila first. “If it doesn’t work — we need time to prepare.” That was a true answer, technically, but not the real reason why Yuuri wanted it to happen immediately. The idea that he could go back in time and prevent this — the idea that Viktor could be saved, and he didn’t have to spend another minute living in a world where Viktor wasn’t, the idea was intoxicating. And so, too, was the hope that they would come back here and Viktor would throw his keys down on the counter and kiss Yuuri in the doorway and marry him.

Yuuri couldn’t bear to see that hope snuffed out, not again.

Yuri seemed to feel the same way, though. He’d gotten jittery, jiggling his leg and phasing in and out of the couch cushions. Ordinarily Yuuri might have nudged him away from it, and Yakov certainly would have scolded him, but no one even mentioned it.

“Yeah,” Yuri said. “Let’s do it now.”

Yakov pulled out a sheaf of diagrams. They looked old, Yuuri thought, startled — the ink was badly faded and parts of it were typewritten, as though they were made decades ago.

Yakov caught his startled look. “This is not a sudden thought.” He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, and Yuuri wasn’t inclined to press.

Instead, he nodded. “You think it — you think I can save him?”

“I don’t know,” Yakov said. “Save Vitya, or stop this war — I do not know. Going back in time, it could change nothing.”

“Or, worse,” Seung-gil cut in. “If you change too much, then you’ll end up in a different timeline. Split off entirely. You can’t tell people what you’re there for.”

“Can I tell people I’m from the future?”

“If you think they’ll believe you,” Seung-gil said flatly.

“Right,” Yuuri said. “How much is too much?”

“Use your best judgment,” Mila suggested.

Yuri snorted. “Right. Great. Don’t fuck up time, Katsudon.”

Yuuri curled his hand into a fist, nails digging into his palm, but he relaxed after a moment. In theory, the idea of causing some sort of time schism was terrifying — but he couldn’t picture what it was like, and even when he tried to conjure an image of what horrible world could result, he couldn’t think of anything worse than this, emptier than this.

From the couch, he could see through the wide doorway into the kitchen, and on the shelf he could see the line of cups, the mug Viktor always used, the odd mismatch of plates that resulted when two people combined their kitchenware without consulting each other, where you ended up with double the amount of silverware you needed and still no one had a cookie sheet. Through the wall was the pantry, the grocery list, Viktor’s jam, Viktor’s handwriting, everything that was the trappings of a life that had in a matter of minutes become the artifacts of some lost civilization.

Yuuri could picture that grocery list in a museum, yellowing under the glass.  _ Grocery list from the last time Katsuki Yuuri was happy, 2018. _

It didn’t matter, he thought, because this already felt like the worst case scenario. He knew, intellectually, that he was not alone, that there was Yuri to think of, and his parents, and Mari, and Phichit, and all of Viktor’s other mutants who’d adopted him as one of their own.

But even though he loved all of them, he hadn’t built a life with them and around them, stared out into the future forever and imagined them there. Yuuri couldn’t picture the next year, the next ten, twenty years, without Viktor.

So when he exhaled again, he felt suddenly calm. In a sense, there was nothing to lose.

Yakov stood up and went to the kitchen. Yuuri started to follow him, but Yakov waved him off, and he was back in a moment with an apple.

“Practice, first,” Yakov set  the apple on the coffee table. “Not too far back, I think.”

“A week?” Yuri said. “Or this morning? Katsudon can just tell him not to go.”

“No,” Yuuri said, thinking about the unease with which the mutant community had been shifting the past weeks. “That won’t solve the problem, will it? Just — postpone it.”

“That could be enough,” Mila said.

“Katsuki’s right,” Seung-gil disagreed with her. “No way to know they won’t just do it again. Or that they didn’t have a backup plan.”

“The conference last month,” Yuri said. “When Leroy made that whole scene about discrimination in public schools. I think that’s when it started.”

“He wasn’t wrong, technically,” Mila pointed out.

“No, but the answer isn’t  _ violence, _ ” snapped Yuuri, silencing her.

“You sound like Viktor,” Yuri said, after a moment.

“That’s not a bad thing,” Yuuri said, wounded.

“Forget Leroy,” Seung-gil said. “Besides.” Then he stopped.

“What?” Yuri said.

“It was just a thought,” Seung-gil was maddeningly vague.

“And the thought was?” Mila demanded.

“Do you think the government shot Nikiforov?” Seung-gil asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Yuri spat. “But when I find out I’m going to rip them apart.”

“I don’t know,” Yuuri said. “They have reason to be wary of him, certainly. He has a lot of influence in the mutant community. But he’s also probably the least radical spokesperson the mutant population has ever had, in terms of advocating nonviolence and cooperating with humans. So it seems… I don’t know.”

“I don’t think the government shot Vitya,” Yakov said. “Why now? Why would they? But.”

“But what?”

“Who else?” he sighed. “If we are going to do this…”

“If we’re going to do this, we have to do it right,” Seung-gil said. “There’s no point in sending Katsuki back in time to mess around.”

“What do you suggest, then?” Yakov bit out.

“I think Leroy had him shot,” said Seung-gil.

“No fucking way,” Yuri said. Then he paused, processing, and his face changed from disbelief to anger. “That fucking bastard-”

“No,” Yuuri said, heart pounding. “He’s radical, sure, but he’s not-”

“Who has something to gain if Vitya dies?” Mila asked, practically. “It gives JJ a lot of power. The only reason he isn’t in charge now is because people listen to Vitya over him, but he’s loud. And a lot of what he advocates, all of that anger, that’s pretty easily weaponized if people are angry about Vitya’s death. If people blame the government…”

“Okay,” Yuuri said. “I’ll- I won’t trust Leroy. If he’s behind this, we’ll find out.”

Yakov nodded. “This has to work at all, first,” he reminded. “Yuri. The apple.”

Yuri picked it up. Viktor had bought it, Yuuri thought; it was dappled yellow and red, round and ripe. He wasn’t sure what kind. Yuri curled his fingers around it and  _ shoved  _ — it vanished for a moment, and then blinked back through in the air a few feet away and thunked to the floor.

“Fuck,” said Yuri.

Yakov bent and retrieved the apple with a grunt as his joints protested. “Here. Again.”

It took four more tries before the apple finally vanished for good instead of toppling back out into the room (or, on the third occasion, into the kitchen, where it badly startled Makkachin).

“Done,” Yuri said triumphantly.

“Good,” Yakov said. “Bring it back.”

“Wait, what?” Yuri said.

“Get it back,” Yakov repeated. “Unless you want to leave Katsuki there for good-”

“No,” Yuri said, “Okay.” It took him several minutes of groping about, but he finally managed to pull the apple back through and thrust it at Yakov. “See?”

“Good,” Yakov said. “Again.”

“Why?”

“Because we have no way to judge your accuracy,” Yakov said. “And so help me god, I would like this to work.”

Yuuri eventually left them there, practicing, to go feed and walk Makkachin. She was a perceptive dog, but not exactly psychic. She could tell that Yuuri was sad (devastated, empty) and wanted to cheer him up, so she cuddled up against his legs and nosed at his palm and snuffled into the back of his knees as they went instead of bounding off after anything that looked edible like she normally did.

At the same time, he didn’t see his grief reflected in her, not yet. Viktor was away frequently; he’d left not so long ago that she’d start to be worried, as much as a dog was capable of worry. He wondered how long it would be before she became anxious, before she began to sit at the front window or spring up barking whenever she heard a key in the lock, hoping that it would be Viktor coming home.

Eventually, perhaps, she would stop expecting him, and Yuuri hated that idea, hated the thought that one day Makkachin would give up. But the alternative was worse — that she would wait, eternally, for Viktor to come home, with no idea that he was dead, that he was gone, that he had left the both of them.

“I’m going to bring him back,” he told her as she sniffed around the base of a maple. “I’m going to bring him home to us.”

She wagged her tail, at his words or his tone or some interesting whiff in the roots, he couldn’t say. He pretended she understood and scratched her ears. “Good dog.”

The atmosphere in the living room when he returned was not quite joyful, but there was an undercurrent of excited tension. “I’ve got it,” Yuri anounced. “We can do it anytime.”

Yuuri half-expected Yakov to object, but he merely sighed. “Let Katsuki prepare.”

Yuuri wasn’t sure how to prepare for something like this. He hung up the leash; he retrieved a backpack and put in a water bottle, his wallet, a glasses case and a handful of other random objects that he spotted as he looped around the house and thought  _ might as well _ . He picked up his cell phone and walked in. “Should I bring it?”

“No,” Mila said. “It’ll overlap with your real one, won’t it? In that time? The frequency, I mean.”

“Is that true?” Yuuri asked Yakov.

Yakov gave him a blank look. “How should I know?”

“I’ll bring it,” Yuuri eventually decided, because he felt unprepared without it.

“Great,” Yuri said.

“Let’s go,” said Seung-gil.

“What?” Yuuri asked. “Where are we going?”

“Back to headquarters,” Yakov said. “It will be an easier place for you to start, and if something goes wrong,” — he gestured expansively around the living room, in a sweeping motion of his hand somehow managing to encompass all the domesticity — “we do not have the capacity to help you here.”

“Okay,” Yuuri said. “I’m ready to go.”

Seung-gil grabbed Yuri’s arm first and vanished. A moment later he blinked back and took Yuuri. Yuuri was still blinking at the change of light, never quite used to the disorienting sensation of teleportation, when Seung-gil arrived again with Yakov and Mila.

The headquarters were familiar by now, if still a little awe-inspiring under typical circumstances. It wasn’t because of any sort of grandeur — they were well-decorated these days, sleek and modern and well-funded as befitted the center of mutant political society, but it had always been the symbolism rather than the actual place that stunned Yuuri. It was the physical manifestation of everything that Viktor had built, all the ways that he had changed the world.

Yuuri’s favorite part was the lettering in sleek gold script that read  _ The Mutant Underground.  _ It stood out against white marble, bright in the sunlight coming through the glass, high above them. They might have kept the name, but they didn’t live below the surface anymore.

Today it hurt to see, because it was another reminder. Yuuri kept looking at things and thinking  _ Viktor, this was Viktor’s, Viktor would like this _ , partly by force of habit and partly deliberately, like it was some sort of betrayal to keep his fiancé anywhere but the center of his thoughts. Or maybe it was like poking at a bruise, prodding at any given opportunity to check whether it still hurt.

Looking at the gold lettering and picturing Viktor’s smile: pain. Yes, it still hurt.

“Are you coming?” Yuri snapped over his shoulder, and Yuuri realized with a shock that they’d all arrived and started walking through the lobby towards the offices and labs in the back.

“Yes,” Yuuri said. “Coming.” He hurried after them, averting his eyes from the sign.

The labs had been there long before Yuuri had met Viktor. They were a critical part of an organization of people who didn’t yet fully understand who they were and how they’d come to be. Some mutations were difficult to handle, harmful to the mutant themselves or to others, and even when the mutation itself wasn’t dangerous, the political implications were potentially deadly when wielded against the unprepared. So from the start,  the Mutant Underground had recognized the necessity of their presence.

Even so, Yuuri had always thought of them more as his part of the building than Viktor’s. Viktor didn’t like labs; he tended to fidget in them, flinching around syringes and pipettes. He came to Yuuri’s, occasionally, and had taken it upon himself to offer DNA samples for Yuuri’s experiments, but he was never truly at ease.

Yuuri didn’t have to wonder why; he’d seen the marks from Viktor’s time in the hands of the government on his arms, the scars now faded but the needle marks still visible all those years later. Mutant experimentation had been popular when Viktor was a child — one of the things that had been banned in one country after the next, treaty by treaty, thanks to the work of the people inside these walls.

But- no, it hurt again. So perhaps the labs were not so much Yuuri’s domain over Viktor’s after all. Or, perhaps it was simply that Viktor was so tied up in Yuuri that nothing was far enough away to escape pain, that anything Yuuri did would carry with it that painful reminder.

“In here,” Yakov said.

They ended up in one of the multipurpose labs, the sort that was used as an examination room more often than a grounds for complex experiments. It wasn’t specialized enough for anything truly revolutionary, but they always had mutants coming in looking for answers, trying to understand. Yuuri had no idea what it would have felt like to them, and he didn’t try to imagine it when he sat down on the table. Instead, he thought of the previous week, the previous month, tried to remember how he had felt that far back. As long ago as the morning felt like an eternity — four weeks ago was utterly unfathomable, an irrevocable distance.

But not impossible to reach, he reminded himself. And not impossible to save Viktor.

“Okay,” Yuri said. His teeth were gritted. He looked, Yuuri decided after a moment, nervous. It was not a comforting thought.

He almost asked, _ are you sure, _ but thought better of it. Yuri would insist he was certain regardless, and whatever additional information Yuuri might gain from probing his apprehension, he didn’t particularly want to know.

“Thank you, Yurio,” he said, instead.

“Go fuck Leroy up, Katsudon,” Yuri instructed. “And save Viktor.”

Yuuri’s lips formed  _ I will _ but the air never had a chance to leave his mouth before he was falling through time.

He thudded to his knees. He blinked and for a brief moment thought it hadn’t worked, that like the apple he’d merely vanished for a moment and landed back on the cold grey tile of the lab. Then he heard glass shatter and looked up.

Across the room, at one of the lab tables, stood Lilia Baranovskaya. Shards of glass clinked to the floor around her where the beaker had slipped from her hand when Yuuri appeared.

“What in the hell are you doing here?” she said.

Yuuri gaped at her. It was undeniably Lilia, but she looked years younger, maybe decades. There were fewer wrinkles in her face, the lines less severe.

“Sorry,” he said. “Ms. Baranovskaya, I-”

“How do you know my name?” she said.

“You don’t — know me?” he asked, carefully.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“I’m- Viktor’s. A friend of Viktor’s. Or-”

She cut him off. “Who in god’s name is Viktor?”

Yuuri felt the blood drain from his face. “You don’t know Viktor?” He stood, carefully, when it looked like she wasn’t about to turn to diamond and murder him for moving.

“I don’t,” she confirmed.  “Should I?”

“What-” he wet his lips nervously. “What year is it?”

“Two thousand and two,” she told him, raising an eyebrow.

Yuuri mouthed the words. “Two thousand and-”

“Two,” she said. “Who are you looking for?”

“He-” Yuuri shook his head to clear it. “He must be sixteen.”

“Sixteen,” Lilia repeated. “I’m sorry, but-”

“This was a mistake,” Yuuri said. “I didn’t mean to — something, I shouldn’t say too much, I think. I’m not sure but-” he cut himself off. “Yakov Feltsman!”

“What do you want with my husband?”

“Your husband,” Yuuri repeated. They hadn’t divorced yet. Of course. “Yes. Right.”

“I suppose you know him too,” Lilia said, skeptically.

“He sort of sent me here,” Yuuri explained.

“He’s down the hall,” Lilia said, with the air of having caught him in a lie. “I’ll go get him and ask.”

“Err,” Yuuri said. “In the future, though.”

“Right,” she said flatly. “But you can’t tell me too much.”

Yuuri hesitated again. Lilia let out a sharp sigh.

“I’ll let Yakov decide what to do with you,” she decided, and gestured him down the hall. Trailing after her, it looked both familiar and unfamiliar. The basic shape of the building was still the same, the pattern of hallways and doors, but the tile was older and dirtier, the walls chipping paint, the lights flickering. This was the Mutant Underground back when they’d been more of a bolthole than an international organization. “What can you do?”

“Sorry?” Yuuri said.

“What do you do?” she repeated.

“I’m a geneticist,” Yuuri said.

“Your mutation,” she said impatiently. “Not your job.”

“I haven’t got one,” he said. She was in the doorway of the room already but she spun back with enough ferocity that Yuuri realized in a moment it was the wrong thing to say.

Her hands were turning to diamond, raising into a fighting stance. He flung his up in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not — where I come from, when I come from, it’s not like that. I’m looking for- Viktor, he’s a mutant.”

She calmed only a little, dropping her hands but leaving them cold and crystalline. “Viktor, again. Who is Viktor?”

“Right now,” Yuuri said, and counted back. Two thousand and two. “Almost sixteen. You broke him out — or, will break him out, of Butyrka Mutant Detention Center.”

“We don’t do that,” Yakov said, gruffly, from behind Lilia. “Move,  Lilia. If he was here to kill me, he’d have come up with a better story.”

She reluctantly stepped aside.

“What?” Yuuri said.

“We don’t do that,” Yakov said.

“You do prison breaks,” Yuuri corrected.

“Yes,” Yakov said. “From holding cells. Low-level facilities. We don’t have the capacity.”

“The capacity,” Yuuri repeated. “But — you do.”

“We don’t,” Lilia said. “Eleven of us, only. And most mutants aren’t dangerous.”

Yakov had turned to go back into the room. Yuuri followed, flinching a little under Lilia’s look, but she said nothing. Yakov pulled the top off a cardboard box and fished around for a file, throwing it open.

“Project Anathema,” Yakov said. “According to the files, they excrete some sort of acid they’re only partially immune to. Not sure how we’d save them even if we could get in. They had some sort of teleporter, but they tried to escape and were shot, according to our reports.”

“Jesus,” Yuuri whispered, thinking of Seung-gil.

“Project Siberia,” Yakov read. “Weather control, probably, but-”

“Viktor,” Yuuri said. “His name is Viktor. He makes — ice. And wind, sometimes. You have to save him.”

“We don’t do that,” Yakov said again.

Yuuri wasn’t sure how Yuri had made this mistake, how he’d ended up so much further than they meant for him to go. He wasn’t sure if that changed anything, how careful he should be about what he said. He didn’t know much about 2002. But he did know Viktor, and he knew the way Viktor smiled, and how he talked about Yakov and Lilia like they’d saved his life, and how the raised scars on his skin remained more than fifteen years later, and the image of Viktor, sixteen and hurting and alone, made him throw all caution to the wind.

“I’m from the future,” Yuuri said. “And so I can tell you that you definitely do.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. I don't bite!
> 
> And if you can leave a comment, please do--they mean a great deal.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri explains, and Yakov and Lilia plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More thanks are in order to the wonderful [Alice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterpile) for the continuing beta read and of course to [Allison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stammiviktor) who hasn't said "I told you so" too frequently.

Yuuri looked back and forth at them, Lilia’s face as impassive and impossible to read as it had ever been, Yakov looking faintly alarmed for a moment before it faded to disbelief.

“Impossible,” Yakov said, flatly. “We have been humoring you, but no. Impossible.”

“What part?” Yuuri challenged. “The time travel? Or rescuing Vitya?”

“Vitya,” Yakov repeated, not answering the question, just testing the sound of the nickname in his mouth.

“Yes,” Yuuri said, although he realized that he’d slipped and used an affectionate form of address. It didn’t matter, he realized then. If it convinced Yakov that this was the right thing to do, he would do anything, say anything.

“What is your name?” Yakov asked.

“Katsuki Yuuri. Err. Yuuri Katsuki. Yuuri is my given name. It goes the other way in Japan.”

“Can you prove it?” Lilia interrupted his tangent.

“That I’m…Yuuri?” he blinked at her.

“That you came here from the future.”

“That I’m- I can try?” Yuuri stumbled through a response. “You should- right now, you have Georgi already, don’t you? He can put people to sleep. He’d be — the same age as Viktor. He’s sixteen.”

“How did you find out his name?” Lilia snapped.

“He is a boy,” Yakov said. “Nothing more. Not a mutant.”

“He’s a mutant,” Yuuri said. “And you know that. But-” it dawned on him. “Most people don’t. He’s a secret. Not anymore. Or, not in my time. Well, the government gets along better with mutants now. There’s non-discrimination laws in place, and accommodation in, in schools-”

“Everything we are working towards, you say,” Yakov said. For a second, Yuuri thought he saw a flash of hope in his eyes, and then it was tamped back down. “I wish you weren’t lying to me,” he sighed.

“I’m not,” Yuuri said, stung. “And it’s because of Viktor. That all of those things come to pass, they’re because of Viktor. You have to save him.” But he sensed that Yakov felt he was telling the truth, that they didn’t have the ability to save Viktor.

Had he come back too far? Yuuri knew better than to think he’d misremembered some detail of Viktor’s past, mistaken a year or something like that. He’d been obsessed with the historiography of Viktor Nikiforov’s life even before Viktor Nikiforov had become Viktor had become Vitya, had become the person he loved, had become the person who at once was both here and suffering, and dead and gone fifteen years from now.

While he worried, Lilia had apparently decided on her next question.

“How did you come back in time, then?” Lilia asked. “You are not a mutant, you say. But you are here.”

“Yuri,” Yuuri said. Then he caught their expressions. “Not me! The other Yuri. He’s got to be just a kid now, he wouldn’t have- I mean. By the time his mutation shows itself, things are much better for mutants. Will be much better.”

“This Yuri. He time-travels,” Yakov said, with a tone that suggested he didn’t believe it.

“No,” Yuuri said. “He, um,” he shook his head. “This was a special application? You said it was something to do with particle movement?”

“ _ I _ said?” Yakov asked.

“Yes,” Yuuri said. “I guess I- I don’t know, I didn’t think about why you had thought about it, but this might be-” he broke off. “I don’t know. Normally he walks through walls.”

“I see,” said Lilia.

“If you-” Yuuri’s mouth felt very dry. He wet his lips with his tongue before he continued. “If you saved him. Viktor, I mean. The future, it’s-” He realized he was tearing up. “I’m sorry.”

“Sit down,” Yakov said, finally, pushing a chair towards him. Yuuri sunk into it gratefully, burying his face in his hands as though if he pressed against his skin it would keep the tears in. It didn’t, but it did grant him a little more dignity when they slipped out and slid down his face behind his hands instead of in full view.

“I didn’t,” Yuuri said, muffled. “I didn’t mean to come back so far. But there’s- it was so much better, and now there’s going to be a war, and-”

“A war,” Yakov said. “We have been on the verge of a war for some time now.”

“It wasn’t like that anymore,” Yuuri said. “It was- he’s dead,” it burst out of him without him meaning to say it, without any conscious decision. “Vitya’s dead.”

“Vitya,” Yakov repeated for the second time.

“Siberia,” Lilia said, leaning over the file.

“No one calls him that,” Yuuri said. “Not anymore. They just call him Viktor or Vitya.”

Yakov looked at him for a long moment. “You aren’t lying to me.”

“No,” Yuuri wiped at his nose. “I- no.”

“But you’re not a mutant,” Lilia said.

“No,” Yuuri said. “I actually, I’m- I’m a geneticist? That’s how I met Viktor. He was interested in my work on the X-gene. I knew of him before that, of course.”

“Because…”

“I told you,” Yuuri said. “He- changed things. Advocacy, mostly. Tolerance. People listened to him. I’d say, I don’t know why but — he was. He is. Really charming. Sincere. People trust him because they know he cares about them.”

Yakov looked at Lilia. Lilia’s mouth was still a thin grim line, but she said, “I wouldn’t like to leave any mutant in Butyrka, important in the future or not.”

“From this long ago,” Yakov said, “What do you expect to do, about your war?”

Yuuri shook his head. “I don’t know. But.” He paused, and then decided that he’d been honest with Yakov and Lilia up until this point and so there was no reason to lie to them now. “I didn’t just- it wasn’t just about the war, for me. I came back in time to save Vitya and- I don’t know if I can do anything to help my Vitya, from here. But if I can do anything to help you save Vitya now — I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

The last few words came out as more of a sob than anything else. After a moment, Yakov reached out and rested a hand on Yuuri’s shoulder. It was an uncertain gesture. Yuuri had never been terribly close to Yakov, but Viktor had always maintained that he was kind beneath the gruff exterior, that Viktor could go to him for anything.

Yuuri hadn’t exactly doubted him, but it was hard to imagine that Viktor hadn’t been exaggerating when he told Yuuri that if he ever needed anything, he could just hug Yakov and Yakov would help him. Still, at that moment he knew exactly what Viktor had meant, and it was that realization that made him lean against Yakov and cry.

Yakov didn’t shove him away, which Yuuri felt he would have been entirely justified in doing. Instead, he awkwardly patted at his shoulder. The awkward angle made the strap of Yuuri’s backpack dig into his shoulder, and Yuuri suddenly remembered.

“Oh! I can prove it!” He pulled back from Yakov and wiped his face again, knowing it was blotchy and red from the crying and not caring. He unzipped the backpack and dug around until he found his wallet. From the wallet he pulled out his driver’s license and shoved it into Yakov’s hands. While he looked at it, he found a quarter from 2014, and then, tucked in a pocket, a photograph of him and Viktor.

It was a polaroid, the sort of thing that Viktor had insisted on because it was cute and Yuuri had gone along with because he liked it when Viktor smiled like he did in the photo, liked the fumbling around as they tried to take a good selfie, liked to watch their figures come into focus in the photograph, the sunset on the water behind them, both of them grinning. They’d had to take six or seven before they’d gotten two good ones, and Yuuri had slipped one into his wallet and watched Viktor do the same.

When his fingers found the edge of the photograph, the quarter slipped from his fingers and rolled across the floor. Lilia stopped its path with her shoe and picked it up, examining it. Yuuri looked at the image and felt his eyes well up again and forced the tears back.

Everything he did, everything he had, reminded him of Viktor, and every fresh reminder sent another spike of grief through him. He couldn’t afford to give into it every time, but he wanted to, wanted to sit down and cry until he was empty of tears, until all the grief bled out of him. But he suspected even that wouldn’t do it, that nothing but time could do anything to dull the ache inside him and maybe even that wouldn’t be good enough.

Lilia had stepped forward with the quarter to show it to Yakov, who traded her Yuuri’s license. They both seemed satisfied when Yuuri looked up, and he stood up and held out the photograph, deliberately not looking at it to try and keep his eyes clear.

“This is, um. Vitya. Viktor.”

Yakov took the photograph from him and looked at it for a moment, then gave it to Lilia. She handed it back, along with the ID, and he put them both back in his wallet. After a moment, Yakov passed him the quarter as well, and Yuuri put it all back in his backpack.

“Yuuri Katsuki from the future,” Lilia said, sounding reluctantly impressed. Yuuri wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her use that tone before. “And you want us to break into Butyrka.”

“Yes,” Yuuri said.

“Who am I to argue with destiny?” Yakov said, with a sigh. “But you will have to tell us everything you remember about how it was done, Katsuki.”

Yuuri tried to think back. “I don’t- I mean, I wasn’t there.”

“Naturally,” Lilia said. “Anything that might help us.”

Yuuri had read the story about it, had seen Viktor’s interviews afterwards, all back when he was only twelve years old. The details of the accomplishment hadn’t been widely publicized, though; it had taken several years longer for Butyrka to be decommissioned, and they wouldn’t have wanted to detail how to escape even if the Russian government hadn’t considered Viktor an escaped convict.

He’d heard more about it years later, from Viktor, and he couldn’t have told you exactly the moment but he could remember the location of the conversation. It had been some morning, early to the point of pre-dusk, more streetlight than sun still, the light soft against the curtains and leaving shadows around them. In the dimness, Yuuri’s fingers had curled around the scars on Viktor’s arms, feeling rather than seeing the damage of more than a decade ago. Viktor had sat perfectly still, letting Yuuri trace out the map of his skin.

“Do you ever think about it?” Yuuri had asked quietly, thumb caressing the raised mark in the crook of his elbow where a needle had once rested.

“Not so often,” Viktor had answered. “No. Why would I?”

“Because they hurt you,” Yuuri had said. “Because…”

“Because in some cases, it is impossible to escape the thoughts of it?” Viktor had asked. “You’re not wrong. But it’s much easier now to think of other things. They’re old wounds, Yuuri.”

“I know,” Yuuri had said. “But.”

“I feel very far away from then,” Viktor had said. “I remember a few things. How it felt to be in that cell with no hope, and then to watch a guard just slip to the ground. One moment, standing there, the next on the floor. And then Yakov was there, in front of my cell, and he said that when the man woke up, we would be gone, if I would like to be.” Viktor had laughed then. “As if I could have said anything but yes!”

“Yakov came and saved you,” Yuuri had said. “I didn’t know that. He doesn’t…” he had trailed off, unsure how to phrase it.

“He doesn’t normally go out and do things like that?” Viktor had laughed. “Not so much anymore, no. He says he is an old man. But he was younger then, and there were not very many of them.”

“Things have changed,” Yuuri had said.

“Very much,” Viktor had replied. “For the better. So while I do not think I have forgotten — I do not think I could forget — I do not think of it so often. What is there to remind me of it, when mutants walk freely and proudly, when the government calls us friends and it is not a death sentence when a teenager finds himself able to walk through walls or change the weather? And in the morning,” Viktor had said, sliding forward under Yuuri’s touch to wrap his arms around his neck and breathe a kiss against his jaw, “When I wake up with you…”

“Okay,” Yuuri had said, feeling warm and relieved and moving his hands to the smooth skin of Viktor’s shoulders and relegating the conversation to memory.

He blushed remembering it, but then the relevant details asserted themselves in his mind. “Georgi,” he said. “He puts the guards to sleep.”

“He’s only sixteen,” Yakov said.

“It is old enough for them to have taken him too,” Lilia said. “And old enough for them when it comes to Siberia. If he wishes to go, I would not stop him.”

“Wishes to go,” Yakov grumbled. “Of course he will wish to go, he is sixteen years old and a romantic. He would like nothing better than to be the fairy tale prince riding in on a rescue.”

Yuuri laughed. Lilia and Yakov both looked at him. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just — it sounds like Georgi won’t change much.”

Lilia let out a gusty sigh. “That boy,” she said. “Still. It is not a bad idea.”

“I will see who else might come,” Yakov said. “We would have to see who it is not too dangerous to return to Russia with. Some of them who are not wanted, perhaps.”

“They know my face,” Lilia said. “You we will still get away with. They do not know the truth about Georgi. Katsuki doesn’t exist, of course,” she scowled. “So we better not bring him.”

“Isn’t that better?”

“No,” Lilia said. “Since the towers came down last year, it has been hell to get on a plane.”

“Oh,” Yuuri said. “I forgot.” Two thousand and two.

She looked at him like he was crazy for a moment, then shook her head. “Well. You will come with me. Yakov will see what resources we might have — and we will plan as much as we can.”

“This is crazy,” Yakov said, flatly.

“Yes,” Lilia said. “It may be enough.”

Yuuri looked at the file stamped SIBERIA and thought of the feeling of the scars on Viktor’s skin. “It will have to be,” he said quietly, and then he followed Lilia down the hall.

Like the rest of the building, it was both familiar and unfamiliar to Yuuri. Everything about it looked older, not just in the dated sense of being years back in time, but in bad need of maintenance. He was struck again by how much had changed, how much Viktor and the others had built in the years since this moment, and was filled with pride and grief all over again.

Halfway down the hall, Lilia led him into another office and began to dig through yet another ancient filing cabinet, rusted and overstuffed. Still, with her typical unnerving precision, she quickly extracted what she was looked for, a long cardboard tube. She explained nothing as she pried the plastic lid off and slid a rolled set of blueprints out.

“Is that-” Yuuri blinked. “Are those blueprints?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Of Butyrka?”

“Yes,” she said, and then caught how wide his eyes were. “What? Did you think we were going to do this blind?”

“No,” Yuuri said, although he wasn’t sure he’d thought much at all about how they were going to do it, only that they had no other choice. “But you said it wasn’t possible.”

“Because we’ve seen the blueprints,” Lilia told him. “Because we know the sort of security they have, technology. The number of guards. We do what we can, Katsuki. And it’s not a matter of priority that has kept us at the lower security facility. It is that we can survive it.”

“Sorry,” Yuuri said.

“Do not apologize,” she said. “You are right. We should not leave a child in hell if we can help it.”

“You’ll like him,” Yuuri said suddenly. “Viktor. He said that-” he broke off.

“Said what?” Lilia said impatiently, after a second of silence.

“I’m not sure how much I should tell you,” Yuuri admitted. “I don’t know what I can say without, I don’t know, breaking the timeline.”

“I think we are far past that,” Lilia said. “Tell me.”

“He said you were like family to him,” Yuuri said. “He doesn’t- he doesn’t have anyone, right now. He’s all alone.”

“He is not,” Lilia corrected. “He has all of us. He just does not know it yet. So we must go and tell him.”

The way she said it, the clear matter-of-factness of it, reminded Yuuri of why he liked her and reminded him of Viktor’s own bright certainty all at once. He wondered how Lilia was taking the news of Viktor’s death, and felt the little punch of sadness in his gut before he forced the thought away.

“Yes,” he agreed. “What do we know?”

She produced a pencil and began cross-referencing some of the notes in the files that appeared to be out of a tax document with the blueprint, marking x’s. Yuuri leaned over to look.

“Employee-” he looked up. “How many guards they have.”

“And where they might be,” she agreed. “And you think Georgi can put them to sleep? There will be many of them. And they will be armed.”

“I think so,” Yuuri said. “Some of them, anyway.”

She nodded. “We’ve thought about how you might weaponize it,” she said in an undertone. “But we try not to speak that way. We are not weapons, Katsuki.”

“No,” Yuuri said. “You’re not.”

“No,” she said. “You are very unusual for a non-mutant, Katsuki. You’re very comfortable around us.”

“The world is more like that, now,” Yuuri said. “Everyone is, I mean.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. But it is not the same. When you saw my mutation,” she said, “you were not even startled. But I suppose if you know Yakov, you know me.  Perhaps you expected it.”

Yuuri shrugged. “I spend a lot of time around mutants,” he said. “I guess it- it’s not that it’s not cool. It’s just a part of you.”

“Is that what people believe in the future?”

“Some of them,” Yuuri said. “A lot of them. Maybe not everyone.”

“That is a better world,” Lilia said, conclusively.

“Yes,” Yuuri said. “I think so.”

“Gosha is very excited,” Yakov said, from the doorway. “Perhaps too excited, but he needed to be talked into nothing.”

“Unsurprising,” Lilia said. “And you will go. Who else?”

“Cialdini volunteered,” Yakov said.

Yuuri startled. “Ciao Ciao?”

“What?”

“My- uh, Phichit. A friend of mine. You wouldn’t- anyway. He nicknamed him that. Because-”

“He says it all the time,” Lilia said, and actually smiled. “Yes.”

“And Lambiel will come if he can,” Yakov said.

“Good,” Lilia said. “You need someone who can get you out if things go badly.”

“Will they?” he asked, nodding at the blueprints.

“Well,” Lilia said. “It might work.”

“Better than we could have hoped,” Yakov shrugged. “It is always unsure.”

“Good,” Lilia said. “Tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Yakov said. “We’re getting tickets.”

“Tomorrow!” Yuuri looked at them. “That’s- fast.”

“Better strike now,” Yakov said. “Our information is the newest now. The longer we wait, the more likely something changes. A guard shift, an alarm system — any one thing that goes wrong, it could be the end of this.”

“Be careful of the boy,” Lilia said.

For a second Yuuri thought she meant ‘with’ and then he understood. “Viktor wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Yuuri said, stung.

“After what they will have done to him,” Lilia said, “some of them, they are so angry they will hurt anyone. It is not an indictment of him,” she said, seeing Yuuri ready to object. “But they will have done everything they can to break him. We must be prepared in case they have succeeded.”

Yuuri shook his head, remembering the newsreel of young Viktor, wounds still fresh, smiling brightly into the faces of people who feared and hated him. “They won’t.”

“I would like nothing more than for you to be right,” Yakov said.

Yuuri let it go then, and just looked down at the blueprint, imagining the lines as cell walls and doors and hallways and somewhere in them, Viktor, hurting, imagining he is all alone in the world.

Then he thought of Viktor’s warm breath against his neck and  _ what is there to remind me of it?  _ and smiled. “I will be."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh, yikes, it's been a really long time. Real life murdered me, but I am clawing my way out of my grave and so our next updates should come much more quickly.
> 
> I'm [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. Come say hi!
> 
> And, if you can, please leave a comment; they mean a lot.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Viktor and Yuuri meet for the first time. Alternatively: Yuuri and Viktor meet for the last time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [Alice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterpile), once again, for her invaluable beta assistance, and of course to [Allison](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stammiviktor) who got texted bits of this as I wrote it but still owes me cake.

Yakov and Georgi left the next morning. Yuuri watched them go, and then watched Lilia, saw how she twisted her hands together when she thought no one was looking.

“Did you want to go with them?”

“I could protect them,” Lilia said flatly. “But there’s not a chance I’d make it through.  Too dangerous. It’s better this way.”

She didn’t like it, though, and Yuuri didn’t either. The absence made his skin crawl, the idea that they’d gone into danger on his suggestion just the cherry on top of the worry it engendered. It all turned out alright, Yuuri told himself, over and over again. He knew that. He had lived it. The future merely felt less certain from here in the past because of his anxiety, not because it was less set in stone.

Or maybe it wasn’t set in stone at all, the nasty voice in his head that he’d nicknamed  _ Seung-gil  _ reminded. Yuuri could be ruining everything.

He had no way of knowing what didn’t matter and what was critically important, though, no way to track the way the little things he said or did could reshape the future, and so he shoved the worry into the back of his mind. Better to focus on the things he could change.

In their absence, he went through every file in Lilia’s cabinet. They had blueprints of prisons, clippings of newspaper reports of mutants, files on any imprisoned mutant they could get their hands on, but most of them were unrecognizable to Yuuri. He was too far in the past, he realized, to even know how to go about solving the mystery of who had shot Viktor. The government administrations had been entirely replaced, people retiring, overhauled by the new outlook on mutant relations. JJ Leroy and his cohort were nothing but children, not even developing their powers yet.

This was why they’d wanted him a week back in time, maybe a month. Then he might have been able to find someone to stop. But if the machinations that would put Viktor in the path of the bullet were already in place, Yuuri couldn’t see them.

In the evening, Lilia turned on the Russian news, but there were never any reports. “What does that mean?” Yuuri asked, after the second evening where the announcer blathered on with no mention of mutants, no photos of a prison.

“No news is good news,” Lilia said. “If they were caught, we would know. If they got away, the government wouldn’t breathe a word to the media.”

Yuuri comforted himself with that thought, but he still lay awake at night and wondered.

They arrived at three AM on the fourth day. Yuuri was asleep on the lower bunk that had unofficially become his over the past few days, but the hallways still echoed oddly, and the sound of voices and slamming doors woke him. He had fallen asleep wearing loaned sweats, far too large, so he changed back into his clothes and found his glasses before heading down the hall. Part of him insisted that the process of dressing was a practical method for waking up. The other part, the anxious-vain part, only cared about what Viktor might think of him.

He set both ideas aside as he walked down the hall, following the thrum of raised voices. He tried to clear his head, as though he could wipe all the buzzing ideas out and project some sort of serenity as he opened the door.

In the front entryway stood Lilia and Yakov. Between them stood Viktor, and when Yuuri saw him it felt like being punched in the gut.

He’d thought, somehow, that all the talk over the past few days and all the watching and rewatching of news clips he’d done as a child could have prepared him for seeing Viktor, but it didn’t. Nothing, he thought now, would have been adequate preparation.

Part of it was the sheer rawness of Viktor’s presence. The total familiarity of the way he held himself, the jut of his cheekbones, how blue his eyes were, even the way he shifted his weight as he turned his head — a perfect likeness, Yuuri thought, but it was the real thing and yet had the quality of nothing so much as seeing a ghost. There were no words to describe what it felt like, seeing Viktor standing there bright and alive in stereo with the grief that had followed Yuuri like a shadow ever since that phone call, simultaneously a few days before and more than a decade into the future.

But even if he’d known his husband waited for him at home, safe and whole, it wouldn’t have mitigated the other part: how terribly young Viktor seemed. He was tall already, taller than Yurio at his age but not as tall as he would be. Yuuri suspected they’d be able to stand eye to eye if he stepped closer. His frame was narrower, more willowy, not yet broad-shouldered, and the effect wasn’t helped by how thin he was, the sharp angles of his elbows and knees. Worst of all was the bandage on his neck; Yuuri remembered it standing out in the video, bright white, but now it was dark with soaked-through blood, faded to dry brown around the edges but still deep red in the center.

“Is it still bleeding?” Viktor turned towards him. It took Yuuri a second to realize that he was the one who spoke.

“Wounds do that.” The heaviness of Viktor’s Russian accent took him by surprise. He’d thought that he’d watched those videos enough to engrave them permanently into his memory, but the reality of Viktor as an adult — the Viktor he lived with, the Viktor he loved — had overwritten some of the details. This Viktor had lived in Russia his whole life. Of course his accent was thicker than the Viktor who had lived in America for fifteen years.

“We can stitch it-” Yuuri reached out and Viktor jerked back. There was a nervous quality to the action, an injured animal, and Yuuri started to pull back and then caught the expression on Viktor’s face, more stubborn than afraid. “Oh, come here,” he snapped.

Viktor gave in immediately and let Yuuri carefully peel up the edge of the bandage. The cut was ugly, like someone had been digging around in the wound. “You have to get better at removing these,” Yuuri said. It sounded more authoritative than he’d meant it to come across, he realized, when he glanced up and saw that Lilia was watching him with her eyebrows raised. “I meant — if you did this surgically, three stitches and we’d be done. Instead of this mess.”

“We were in a hurry,” Yakov said. “But you’re right. Viktor, this is Yuuri Katsuki.”

“We should clean it and stitch it up properly,” Yuuri said. Viktor flinched a little when Yuuri smoothed the bandage back into place. “I can get you a painkiller first.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Viktor said.

It had to; nothing short of severe nerve damage would make a cut like that painless. But Viktor held himself stiffly and said nothing.  _ Trying not to show weakness _ , Yuuri thought, tired and fond all at once. He let the lie go. “Alright. Let me get some supplies.”

He looked away from Viktor for a moment and realized that Lilia and Yakov were still standing there, just watching him. He realized he’d stepped into the role of looking after Viktor without speaking to them, without waiting for instructions. “Sorry, I-”

“You can go to the back,” Lilia said.

She meant the lab, so Yuuri shook his head. “Vitya, do you want to wait out here? I’ll come back with things. I think there’s a chair in here already.”

Viktor froze up. Lilia was already talking. “It will be more private-”

“He won’t like the lab,” Yuuri said.  “And-”

“What did you call me?” Viktor interrupted.

“I-” Yuuri rewound the conversation in his head. “Oh. I’m sorry. If you don’t like it, I won’t.”

“I don’t — I like it. How did you know to call me that?”

“It sounded right,” Yuuri said. “You’re Russian, aren’t you?”

Viktor nodded, but didn’t look appeased.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Viktor. Lilia had opened her mouth again. “Walk with me,” Yuuri said. He was surprised by how easily he was standing up to Lilia. He wasn’t afraid of her, exactly; even though she and Yakov had been divorced by the time that he met Viktor, Viktor had spoken of her fondly and Yakov had been respectful about her, if nothing else. He knew she was a good person. But she’d always been intimidating in a way that he’d been unwilling to cross.

The last few days had stripped away some of his wariness, he realized. Standing up to Lilia was nothing compared to losing Viktor, easy compared to traveling through time.

She fell into step next to him, leaving Yakov and Viktor in the front hall. “He won’t like the lab,” Yuuri said. “Whatever you’re calling it, it looks like a science lab.”

Lilia’s expression resolved into understanding. “They’ve been experimenting on him.”

“I don’t want him to remember that. When I’m helping him. He- gets better, about it, but he’ll never like it.”

“I see,” Lilia said.

Yuuri had a nagging sense of discomfort in the back of his mind. “How long have you been back?” He wasn’t sure how quickly he’d been woken, and he’d stopped to get dressed, but Viktor had still been standing in the entryway with a sorry excuse for a bandage on his neck. “Where are the others?”

“Perhaps half an hour,” Lilia said, then checked the clock. “A little less.”

Yuuri headed into the lab and started opening the cupboards. “Where-”

“Three over,” Lilia instructed.

Yuuri moved over and found a first-aid kit and a collection of other supplies. He found a roll of bandages, rubbing alcohol, a package with a sterile needle. He examined it in the light. “You don’t have a doctor, do you?”

“No,” Lilia said. “We are not fighting a war.”

“ _ You _ might not be-” Yuuri said, then stopped himself.

“No, you are right,” Lilia said. “We are having one waged against us.”

“Where are the others?” Yuuri repeated.

Lilia sighed. Yuuri’s veins felt like they’d filled with ice.

“What-”

“They’re fine,” she interrupted. “Georgi is- in his room. Stephane and Celestino did not return with Yakov, but they are unhurt.”

“So-”

“Georgi killed a man,” Lilia said, shortly.

“What?” Yuuri said blankly. He knew Georgi, Georgi and his obsession with romantic love and his rotating cast of girlfriends. He didn’t think that Georgi was capable of that sort of violence, even as an adult. He had a sudden flash of a vicious teenage Georgi, but even in his mind’s eye it resolved as more of a parody of reality than an actuality. “How even-”

“It was an accident,” Lilia said. “Perhaps we have not been careful enough, knowing what he can do. But sleep seems so harmless.”

So he’d done it with his mutation. That made more sense than the picture of Georgi, somehow with a gun, but still…

“He was very upset,” Lilia said. “We should discuss it more later.” She nodded at the small pile of supplies Yuuri had gathered.

“Was Viktor?”

“What?”

“Was Viktor upset?”

“No,” Lilia said. “Not that Yakov said.”

“Right.” Yuuri wanted to talk to Yakov, wanted to wring every detail out of him about the way that Viktor had been held, about what he had said, about how he was doing. But one thing at a time.

Viktor was sitting down when they came back. Yakov had found a chair somewhere. They were talking in Russian, but Viktor switched over to English when he saw Yuuri. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” Yuuri agreed. “I’m not the best at stitches,” he warned, “but I do know how, and we can’t leave it open.”

“I don’t mind,” Viktor said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It might scar,” Yuuri said. There was no  _ might  _ about it, Yuuri thought; it would scar, a little raised crescent about a centimeter in length across the side of his neck. It was almost the same color as his skin, though; it wasn’t something Yuuri saw so much as felt when his finger settled against it when he and Viktor kissed. It was a little scar, surprisingly so if Yuuri had done the stitching — but of course there was no guarantee of that. Yuuri had no idea how the world was reshaping itself with every action he took.

There was no point in worrying about it. Time travel was hardly an exact science.

“I have a lot of those,” Viktor said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

Yuuri’s heart ached. “Alright,” he said. “Sit still.”

Viktor tensed up when Yuuri removed the bandage again, but he did keep still as Yuuri wiped the wound with alcohol, even though he let out a hiss through his teeth at the sting. Yuuri was hesitant at first, but the edges of the cut were ugly, and he eventually gave into thoroughness over gentleness. By the time he finished, Viktor was so tense he was practically vibrating.

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri said, and he meant it. “I’m done cleaning it. I’m sorry.” He tucked a stray strand of hair behind Viktor’s ear. “Are you sure you don’t want something for the pain?”

“Yes,” Viktor said. He relaxed a little bit at Yuuri’s touch.

“I need to stitch it up,” Yuuri said. He picked up the tube he’d found in the cupboard and offered it to Viktor to examine. “It’s just a topical solution. It’ll only numb it right around the cut. If you’re worried about keeping a clear head.”

“I-” Viktor hesitated. He took the tube from Yuuri and then just stared at the label.

“I don’t want to hurt you unnecessarily,” Yuuri said, honestly. “I don’t want to hurt you at all.”

“Alright,” Viktor agreed, and handed it back. “That’s fine.”

Yuuri uncapped it and started carefully applying it around the wound. “I think we have to wait a few minutes for it to kick in,” he said.

“Is that your mutation?”

“What?” Yuuri said. “Waiting?”

Viktor laughed. It was barely a laugh — more of a snort that anything, a little surprised amused exhale — but his eyes crinkled up for a moment and Yuuri knew, he knew better than anything what it looked like when Viktor laughed.

At least he could still do that.

“No,” Viktor shook his head. “Reading minds. Are you reading mine right now?”

“No,” Yuuri said. “No, not at all. Why would you think that?”

“Oh,” Viktor said. “You knew my nickname, earlier. And just now, when you knew why I wouldn’t take painkillers.”

“That wasn’t a hard guess,” Yuuri told him. “They were- I knew where you came from.”

“Were you ever in one?” Viktor asked.

“No,” Yuuri said. He had finished with the numbing gel and so he recapped the tube and folded his hands in his lap. “I’m not a mutant, Vitya.”

“What?” Viktor’s entire body went still. “They said-”

“They’re mutants,” Yuuri said. “I’m not.”

Viktor looked on the verge of standing up. “But then-”

“Then what?” Yuuri said.

“Then why are you helping me?” Viktor demanded.

The sudden suspicion hurt more deeply than Yuuri had expected it to, but he understood it. Of course he understood it. Viktor had experienced nothing but pain at the hands of humans for a long time now — hiding, and then months in that horrible place, and even now it was clear he only believed he was safe surrounded by his own people, people with as much to lose from discovery as he did.

“Because I care about you,” Yuuri said, “and I don’t want you hurt.”

“You don’t know me,” Viktor said.

“I’d like to,” Yuuri said, rather than debating the truth of that statement. In a way, it was true — he didn’t know this Viktor, Viktor at sixteen, Viktor who was young and hurt and uncertain. It wasn’t fair to expect the same behavior from him now as in fifteen years.

“Why?” Viktor said. “You know I’m a mutant.”

“So are Yakov and Lilia,” Yuuri said. “Everyone else in this building, I think.”

“So why do you care?”

“Because what’s the difference?” Yuuri said. “What’s the difference between you and me?”

“This,” Viktor snapped, and from his hand a chunk of ice formed, swirling upward from a light coating of frost on his palm to a solid chunk of it nearly the size of a baseball. In an instant, his fingers curled around it and he flung it down at the floor, where it shattered with a spectacular crack into hundreds of splintering pieces. “That’s what’s different!” Viktor’s shout echoed around the space.

Through the display, Yuuri hadn’t moved. “It’s a good skill,” Yuuri said mildly. “My mom’s a cook. She taught me to make this dish called katsudon. It’s rice and egg and onions and fried pork. You’d like it. Maybe I can teach you sometime.”

“That’s the difference,” Viktor said, looking down at the now-melting shards. “I can’t teach you this.”

“No,” Yuuri agreed. “But we’re not so different.”

“Aren’t you scared of me?”

“No,” Yuuri said. “And you need to stop expecting it of people. Then maybe they can’t use it as an excuse.”

“You make it sound easy,” Viktor said, more quietly.

“I know,” Yuuri said. “And it isn’t. I know. How’s your neck?”

“Numb,” Viktor reported.

“Let me stitch it up,” Yuuri said.

Viktor still tensed a little when he put the needle in, but he wasn’t shaking the entire time—which was good, because Yuuri needed every bit of coordination he could muster. It took him seven stitches to close the cut. Then he pulled back to examine it.

“That felt strange,” Viktor said, as Yuuri checked over his handiwork. “But it didn’t hurt.”

“Good,” Yuuri said. “It looks okay. We’ll have to keep an eye on it. Make sure it doesn’t get infected.”

“They cleaned it when they cut it out, too,” Viktor said.

“Good,” Yuuri said. He wasn’t surprised. Yakov had been there, and Yakov had more common sense than most of the rest of Yuuri’s acquaintances put together. “I’ll bandage it again soon.”

Viktor nodded. His skin was very cold where Yuuri touched it. Yuuri took another look at him; he was wearing long sleeves, but the fabric wasn’t so thick that he wouldn’t feel the chill in the air, especially considering how thin he was.

“You could take a shower,” Yuuri suggested. “Warm up? There’s hot water.”

“I don’t get cold,” Viktor said. “Mutation.”

Yuuri stared at the sixteen-year-old version of the man he’d seen shiver in the snowstorms he created and complain about the temperature and press icy feet against Yuuri at night, and was briefly reminded not of his fiancé but of Yuri at his most teenage and standoffish. “Bullshit.”

Viktor blinked at him, like he was startled to be called on it. “Are you sure you don’t read minds?”

“Yes,” Yuuri said. “Go take a shower.”

“Where?” Viktor asked.

“Down the hall, fourth door on the left,” Yuuri instructed. “I’ll find clothes for you.”

Viktor went; Yuuri waited for him to vanish into the bathroom and then went to go find Lilia.

“You handled that well,” Yakov said, when he found him and Lilia standing in the office.

“I know him,” Yuuri said. “How was he?”

“Afraid,” Yakov said flatly. “Stubborn. Willing to follow us when he saw what we were and not a second before. Does he know?”

“Know what?”

“That you’re not a mutant.” Yakov always said that — ‘not a mutant’ — rather than ‘human’.  Yuuri appreciated that sort of stubbornness, the refusal to give up the label of ‘humanity’ no matter what the general linguistic consensus.

“Yes,” Yuuri said. “I told him.”

Lilia raised an eyebrow.

“There’s some ice on the floor,” Yuuri said. “But I think we understand each other.”

“Remarkable,” Lilia said, and she sounded like she meant it. Yuuri flushed.

“I had an advantage,” he said, because he had. As much as he knew this Vitya wasn’t the same person as his, they had enough in common that Yuuri could read his expressions, could guess what was making him hesitate. It wasn’t quite mindreading, but it might have seemed close enough to someone who didn’t know that the other person had lived with them, had known them for long enough to brand the details of who they were and how they thought onto their consciousness.

“Where is he now?”

“Taking a shower,” Yuuri said. “I came to see about clothes?”

“He and Gosha should be about the same size,” Yakov said. “He stays in the bedroom on the right.”

Yuuri nodded. He turned and headed down the hall.

“Katsuki,” Yakov said. “He is upset.”

“I know,” Yuuri said. “I’ve got it.”

He was four steps down the hall before he decided that he didn’t, in fact, ‘have it’, largely because he had no idea what to say to someone who had killed when they didn’t mean to. It certainly wasn’t a situation he’d been in before. The only person he knew who had was —

— taking a shower down the hall.

Yuuri knocked on the door. “Georgi?” he said. “It’s Yuuri Katsuki. I came to see if I could borrow some clothes for Viktor.”

A moment of silence. Then a wobbly, “Come in.”

Georgi had been crying. That, at least, Yuuri was familiar with. He swiped at his face and looked up at Yuuri from his spot on the lower bunk.

“I’ve got-” he got up and rummaged through the drawers, finding clothes and folding them into a stack. It had a t-shirt in it, and then he paused and went back and found a long-sleeved sweatshirt and added it to the pile. “He had all these cuts on his arms.” He handed the stack to Yuuri.

“I think he’ll appreciate that,” Yuuri said. “Thank you, Georgi.”

Georgi shrugged and sat back down on the bed.

“Would you mind if Viktor comes and talks to you for a bit, when he’s done?” Yuuri asked.

“Sure,” Georgi said.

“Thanks,” Yuuri said. Then he went down the hall to the bathroom. “Viktor? I’m putting clothes for you in the doorway.”

“Okay,” Viktor called back, over the sound of the water. Yuuri crossed to the other side of the hall and sat on the floor with his back against the wall, trying to decide what to say.

It wasn’t too long before the water stopped; about ten minutes after that, Viktor emerged wearing the clothes Yuuri had gotten from Georgi. The jeans seemed to mostly fit, but the sweatshirt was too big. Viktor’s hair hung tangled and damp around his face.

“I need to borrow a comb,” he said.

“Right,” Yuuri said. “Let’s go find Lilia.”

They were still in the office when Yuuri reappeared. Lilia pulled one from her purse and handed it to Viktor, but when he started to jerk it through the tangles she snatched it back.  “Not like that,” she ordered. “Come here.”

Viktor reluctantly shuffled over. She moved his hair to the back and started combing it carefully, beginning at the ends. “Never start from the top,” she ordered. “You’ll make the tangles worse.  Start at the bottom and be gentle. You have long hair, you must know this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Viktor said, and then added something in Russian that made her sniff. Yuuri watched in fascination as she made her way to the top of his head until all of the hair was smooth and all the knots were gone. Then she separated it into three parts and braided it quickly, tying it off at the bottom with a rubber band.

“How is that?” she asked.

“Thank you,” Viktor said, quietly. “My mother used to do that.”

“I will get you your own comb,” Lilia said.  “We will make a list of what you will need.”

“You don’t-” Viktor looked a little startled. “You don’t have to do that.”

“What else would you do?” Lilia said. “When we free young mutants, Viktor, we are prepared to care for them.”

“Thank you,” Viktor repeated. “All of you.”

“Georgi does not have a roommate,” Lilia said. “He’s about your age. Did you get along?”

“With Zhora?” Viktor said. “Yes. We were fine.”

“Good,” Lilia said. “Yuuri knows where that is.”

They went back out into the hall. A few steps from the door Yuuri said, “Actually, I have a favor to ask.”

“What?” Viktor looked wary, which Yuuri couldn’t suppose he blamed him for.

“Could you talk to Georgi? About what happened. I heard he killed a guard.”

“They deserved it,” Viktor said, snappishly. Then he sighed. “Or — I don’t know.”

“No one blames him,” Yuuri said. “But he’s upset.”

“Why do you want me to talk to him?”

“Because you know what that’s like.”

“What?” Viktor blinked. “That isn’t in my file. Is it? It isn’t.”

“No,” Yuuri reluctantly admitted. He rushed on. “Please talk to Georgi. He didn’t mean to hurt them.”

“I know,” Viktor said. “He puts people to sleep, doesn’t he? That’s — useful. But it slows down everything, your blood flow, your heart — it might be useful, actually, some of that, but you do it too much and-” he drew a line across his throat.

“Yes,” Yuuri said.

“I’ll talk to him,” Viktor agreed. “But only if you promise me something.”

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t read minds,” Viktor asked, “Then how do you know all these things about me?”

They had reached the door of the bedroom. Yuuri made a split-second decision. “Talk to Georgi,” Yuuri repeated. “Then come find me, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Viktor said, and knocked on the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. Come say hi!
> 
> If you can, please leave a comment; they mean a lot.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things come to light, and some other things plan to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, as always, to the wonderful [Alice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterpile) for the beta help. She is the only reason this story is internally consistent at this point.

While Viktor disappeared behind the bedroom door with Georgi, Yuuri went down the hall. He stopped in the doorway to the office, but Yakov and Lilia weren’t there, and so he continued down into the similarly-deserted kitchen. Every time that Yuuri had been to this building in his own time, it had been packed with people — working, chatting, drafting letters. A center of the mutant community.

In this time, it lived up to its name: underground. A hideout. There were only a few mutants living there, and those who didn’t stay put came and went quietly. Secrecy was still critical for survival.

Yuuri rooted through the cupboards, looking for tea. He was tired, the adrenaline of Viktor’s arrival slipping away from him by now, but he wanted a clear head. The cupboard where he remembered a careful row of tins of loose-leaf was instead occupied by a canister of salt and a truly ancient-looking toaster; he found only a box of Lipton black tea in one of the drawers further down. There was a kettle, but it was lined with dust. He had to fill it twice in the sink and dump it out before it looked clean enough to use.

He set it boiling and then tracked down a mug to deposit his teabag in, leaning back against the counter to watch. While he waited, he began to tick through his list of immediate concerns.

One, Viktor. He’d promised to tell the teenager how he knew about him. It was a reckless promise, Yuuri already knew, but the instinct to confide in Viktor hadn’t gone away. He could see little choice but to keep it: he’d already told Viktor that he wasn’t a mutant, which wiped out most options for convincing lies.

So Viktor would know he was from the future. He’d already told Yakov and Lilia, so he couldn’t see a reason why that would cause any more harm.

Two, the war. Fifteen years back in time was so distant that Yuuri couldn’t even think of where to start. JJ Leroy, their prime suspect, would be nothing more than a child. Viktor was only a teenager. No one could possibly be plotting so far back.

The kettle started whistling, and Yuuri pulled it off the heat, pouring the water into the mug and watching it steep in little swirls of brown. He carried it to the table and set it down, sinking into a chair and staring into the water.

What was left was three, the fact that he was still back in time. He wasn’t sure how long they planned to leave him there, or when they would realize they’d made a mistake. It had already been several days — surely Yuri would pull him back to the present soon, wouldn’t he? Or would he even be able to? Did he realize what he’d done?

And how much damage had Yuuri’s foray here done to the timeline? Was he still here because there was no one even trying to pull him back to the present?

Yuuri didn’t like that idea at all, that so much had changed that Yuri Plisetsky wasn’t safe back in his and Viktor’s — his, just his now, he reminded himself harshly — time. He tried not to think about it, but there it was: Yuuri had no idea how to save Viktor, and no idea what waited for him in the present.

Yuuri was so lost in thought that he almost didn’t notice when Viktor slipped into the room and stood at his shoulder. At sixteen he was already a little taller than Yuuri; he tipped forward onto his toes to peer over down into the teacup.

“Looking for something in there?” Viktor asked.

“Just caffeine,” Yuuri said dryly.

“You know,” Viktor said, circling around the table to sit across from him, “Some people say you can see the future in the leaves at the bottom of the cup when you finish drinking.”

Yuuri found the end of the bag and held it up. “Just Lipton. No futures here.”

“Shame.” Viktor didn’t really sound disappointed. “So.”

“Did you have a good conversation with Georgi?” Yuuri asked.

Viktor huffed, easily noticing the redirect. “Fine.”

“What’s ‘fine’?”

“Fine,” Viktor said. His petulance was a little more subtle than Yurio’s, but it still didn’t suit him.

“What did you tell him?” Yuuri asked.

Viktor started to scowl, but then relented. “I told him that those men knew where they worked. That they were the ones, every day, who dragged us from our cells with cuffs that inhibited our powers. Who slammed us into the ground and strapped us down to the tables. That they had shot others, for running. That I’d watched mutants — one of them was just a kid — bleed out from their bullets. That they’d spit on his dead body. That they deserved it.”

“Viktor,” Yuuri began, horrified, but Viktor kept talking.

“And I told him that- that I knew he didn’t mean to do it. That he shouldn’t feel like it was wrong, because those men would have killed us and would have liked it. But that I knew he didn’t mean to do it and that he’s not a killer because of it. That sometimes you do what you have to, when you’re trying to survive, and that’s how life goes.

“His power, you know, it’s- good, mostly, and I told him that. That there’s so many things you can do, you can help someone who needs rest, or who’s in pain. If you’re bleeding, his power can slow that down, or if someone’s panicking it can help them breathe the way they’re supposed to. And so he’ll be able to do a lot of good things with it.”

Relief flooded through Yuuri. He’d worried, when Viktor began to talk, that he’d made the wrong choice — that whoever he imagined Viktor as a teenager bore less resemblance to his fiancé than he’d thought, and that he’d given him leave to share his anger with Georgi.

And Viktor was angry, true — Yuuri couldn’t ignore the flash of fire in his gaze when he talked about what the guards had done to him and the other mutants. But everything else he’d said to Georgi, about his powers, about what he was capable of, that was the Viktor that Yuuri knew and trusted more than anything else. The Viktor who saw the best in people no matter what.

“And I told him-” Viktor broke off and cleared his throat. “I told him that I know what he did, he did it to save me, and I’m grateful for it.”

“Thank you,” Yuuri said, quietly. “I knew you would say the right thing.”

“How?” Viktor challenged. “How did you know?” When he saw Yuuri begin to hesitate, he added quickly, “You promised you would tell me.”

“I did,” Yuuri agreed. “Alright.” He still wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but he’d already made his decision. “I’m from the future.”

“Bullshit,” Viktor said, with the exact same intonation Yuuri had used earlier to cut off his assertions of invulnerability to temperature.

“It’s true,” Yuuri insisted. “I’m from about fifteen years from now. We know each other then.”

“How?” Viktor asked. “You’re saying — you know these things about me because I told you?”

“Some of them,” Yuuri said, carefully. “And because I know you.”

“Prove it,” Viktor said.

“I think I already have,” Yuuri said. “Alright. I thought you would say the right thing to Georgi because you know what it’s like to hurt someone and not mean it. When they came to your house and took you, you heard your mother answer the door. You saw them knock her unconscious from the top of the stairs, and you were afraid. When they came for you, you threw everything you could at them. Your whole bedroom floor, the landing and the staircase, you froze it all over. And at the landing you shoved one of them, and the frozen bannister shattered and he fell to the ground floor. His neck snapped on impact.”

Viktor had gone perfectly still as Yuuri spoke. “Who told you that?”

“You did,” Yuuri informed him. “You will.”

He could remember the night perfectly. Viktor had gone to bed first, fifteen or twenty or maybe even thirty minutes before Yuuri had gotten up from his computer and joined him, but he hadn’t gone to sleep. Yuuri had thought he was asleep, had tiptoed into the room and slid under the covers, ready to play a game on his phone with the screen dimmed for a few minutes before he dozed off, but instead Viktor had sat upright.

“I need to tell you something,” he had said. In the darkness, Yuuri couldn’t see the expression on his face. The only light came from Yuuri’s phone, which reflected back on his own face more than anything, and the moonlight that slotted through the blinds and given him the faint outline of Viktor’s profile.

“What is it?” Yuuri had asked, heart pounding as he sat up too, setting his phone face-down on the sheets to make the darkness more absolute.

“I should have told you before,” Viktor had said, and in the moonlight Yuuri had caught the way he had lifted his right hand to twist the gold ring around and around his fourth finger, the ring Yuuri had given him only days before. “I killed someone.”

Yuuri’s brain had short-circuited for a moment. “Recently?”

“No,” Viktor assured him, with a tiny huff of a laugh, and then he had told him. When he stopped speaking, there was only a breath of silence between them before Yuuri had shifted over and pulled Viktor into his arms.

“You didn’t mean it,” Yuuri had said. “And they hurt you. They hurt your mother and they were going to hurt you.”

“I know,” Viktor had said. “But I didn’t- I wanted to tell you. You needed to know.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Yuuri had told him, and meant it with every fiber of his being. “I still love you, and I’ll always love you.”

He hadn’t been able to see Viktor’s eyes in the darkness then, but he could see them perfectly now, pupils dilated like a frightened animal. “Why would I do that?”

“You wanted me to know,” Yuuri said. “You didn’t say why, but I could guess, and it didn’t change anything for me.”

Viktor still looked at him like he didn’t quite believe it.

“Sometimes you do what you have to do, when you’re trying to survive, and that’s how life goes,” Yuuri said, gently.

“Okay,” Viktor said. He blinked, and Yuuri could see the exact moment he allowed the tension to seep out of his posture, the way his shoulders slumped and he breathed out. “I believe you.”

“Good.” Yuuri had almost forgotten that he was meant to be proving that he was from the future. The fact of the matter was, if Viktor hadn’t believed him from this anecdote, he had a hundred others. In the years they had known each other, the secrets and uncertainties of their respective histories had slowly been worn away by time and proximity and conversation.

Yuuri knew how Viktor liked his tea, how he liked coffee when he drank it although he rarely did, what books he liked and which ones he didn’t, the way he ordered his clothing in his closet. He knew about Viktor’s mother, whom he’d loved dearly, and the father who had left when he was a child. He knew how Viktor had first discovered he had powers, how he’d pulled snow from the air in the living room in mid-July and called his mother to come look and how horrified she had been, how she had made him swear never to tell anyone about it. He knew how badly Viktor had wanted a dog, as a child, and he knew that Viktor would get his first one at seventeen, courtesy of Yakov and Lilia.

I know you, Yuuri thought, as Viktor’s brow furrowed and his expression drifted into something thoughtful. I know who you are and nothing will ever change that.

Nothing but Viktor being gone.

It was easy to forget, sitting so close to him, fifteen years away from the event, but everything Yuuri had hoped for when he’d volunteered to go back in time was still out of reach. His Viktor was dead and gone and nothing Yuuri said to his younger self was going to resurrect him, no matter how much he might have wished it to be true.

Still, there was one thing that Yuuri was determined to look at as a blessing: if nothing else, he’d been given a little more time with the first person he’d ever wanted to hold onto, the person he loved more than anything in the world. It was true that this Viktor wasn’t the same Viktor he would know in the future, the Viktor he fell in love with and asked to marry him, but there was enough of him that it felt like he was getting something back, if only for a few moments.

And Yuuri would take even these few fragments over never seeing Viktor again every time.

“Why are you here?” Viktor asked, breaking into his thoughts. “You’re not a mutant, you said.”

“No,” Yuuri said. “A mutant sent me back here, though.” He had already decided that he wasn’t going to tell Viktor that he died. It felt too much like setting a self-fulfilling prophecy into place. “We’re- afraid there’s going to be a war. Between mutants and humans. And I was sent back to stop it.”

“What are you supposed to do?” Viktor demanded. “Can I help?”

“We made a mistake,” Yuuri admitted. “I wasn’t supposed to be this far back in time. So… I don’t know. I don’t even know if there’s anything I can do here.”

“Oh.” Viktor slumped back in his seat, disappointed. “Well.” Then his face changed, as though he was just realizing something. “Wait. You said you were from fifteen years in the future.”

“Yes.”

Viktor looked devastated. “And things get worse? There’s going to be a war?”

“No!” Yuuri said. “Or- maybe, but, no. Things get better. For a long time, things get better. So much better. They stop- people stop persecuting mutants. It gets so much safer. Humans and mutants start to trust each other.”

“Oh,” Viktor said. There was a moment where he thought about that. Then he asked, “Really?”

It was the way he said it — the slight breathlessness of it, all the hope packed into that one word — that Yuuri felt in his chest.

“Really,” Yuuri promised.

“I guess that’s how we can be friends,” Viktor mused. “That’s—good. I’m glad.”

“Me too,” Yuuri said. “Things get better. I promise.”

“But you said there’s going to be a war.” Viktor was looking right at him, eyes like chips of ice. Yuuri’s Viktor had the uncanny ability to look at him and see right through him. This Viktor didn’t, not yet, but the familiarity of his most piercing stare was uncanny. “How, if things get better?”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” Yuuri said. “Really. I probably shouldn’t have told you all of this. But — a lot of things happen. It’s not that things go straight downhill.”

“Maybe I can change it,” Viktor suggested. “Maybe- if it’s like you said, and things get better, or can get better. Maybe we can avoid your war.”

“Maybe,” Yuuri said.

“You don’t think I can,” Viktor said.

“I think you can do anything,” Yuuri said, honestly. “I’d like to think you can avoid this war.” But he was beginning to wonder if the only way for Viktor to do that was to live, and he wasn’t sure how to tell him to do that. Warn him about the speech? But they still had no idea who had ordered the hit or why. There was no way to make sure they wouldn’t strike another time.

Viktor was studying him. “You worry too much.”

Yuuri blinked. “What? I wasn’t worrying.”

“You were,” Viktor insisted. “You get a look on your face.”

“What kind of look?”

“A worried one,” Viktor said, and then amended, “and a sad one. When you think I’m not looking.”

“I guess I am worried,” Yuuri allowed. “About this war.”

“And sad,” Viktor said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Yuuri replied, but he didn’t give a reason.

“Does that mean you’re going back?” Viktor asked. “Into the future, I mean. Or are you just stuck here now?”

“I think I’m going back,” Yuuri said. “I should be going back.”

“Okay,” Viktor said. “I’ll meet you again, though, right?”

“Yeah,” Yuuri assured him. “Of course.”

Viktor nodded, but he was kicking his heels back against the legs of the chair. Yuuri hadn’t thought about how Viktor might feel when he left, although he realized now that he should have. Viktor had been taken away from his family by virtual strangers, and although he’d eventually come to think of Yakov and Lilia as family, of course he didn’t yet. Quite by accident, the person he was closest to might have been Yuuri.

And Yuuri was, if everything went well, leaving.

“Good. That’s good,” Viktor said.

“Yakov and Lilia,” Yuuri said. “They’re really good people. They care about you.”

“Okay,” Viktor said. “Thanks.”

“Besides,” Yuuri said, “I don’t know when I’ll be going back.”

“How will you know?” Viktor asked.

“Well-” Yuuri started to say that he wasn’t entirely sure, and then he felt a hand brush his shoulder. “Hey, did-” He turned around and then froze.

“Yuuri?”

“I swear I felt…” Yuuri started, and then he felt it again, the touch of a phantom hand. “Shit.” He jerked back.

There was nothing after that.

“What was that?” When Yuuri turned back towards the table, he saw that Viktor had stood up and his hand had gone frosty the way it always did at the sight of danger. The tabletop in front of him was speckled with frost as well.

“I think that was my way home,” Yuuri said. “I don’t know if he meant to bring me back, or just to find me.” He tried to remember the details of it, but all he could picture was Yuri grasping around in the air, reaching through time for the apple he’d let go.

“He?”

“A mutant. You don’t know him.”

“Don’t know him in the future?”

“Yet,” Yuuri corrected. “Not yet.”

“Are you going now, then?” Viktor said. His mouth had settled into a thin, unhappy line.

“I don’t know,” Yuuri said. He glanced back and forth, but he didn’t feel the hand again. Yuri seemed to be gone. He looked down at the table. “Can you…?”

Viktor followed his gaze. “Shit.” The frost had spread across the table and was creeping up the side of Yuuri’s mug. It melted into the air. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Yuuri told him. He was trying to think of a way to reassure Viktor without lying to him — he was going to have to go, eventually, and it was starting to look like sooner rather than later — when the door to the kitchen banged open.

“Yuuri,” Yakov greeted. “Viktor. Good. Something’s happened.”

“What?” Yuuri’s heart felt like it was pounding in his chest.

“The Russian government has announced their search for fugitive mutants, believed to have fled to the United States.”

“No,” Yuuri said, with a glance at Viktor.

“They demanded extradition,” Yakov told them. “It went over poorly. The president is now requesting those mutants make themselves known, and is promising their safety.”

“Me,” Viktor said dully. “They mean me, right?”

“You were named among the list,” Yakov said.

“It’s too risky,” Lilia interjected. “It’s one thing to have this as a publicity stunt. A way to spite Russia and to appease mutant activists here. But they have been calling Viktor ‘highly dangerous’. They will not let him go free.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Yakov said. “I can’t imagine any of the others will come forward. And Viktor is only a child.”

“We’ll have to keep our heads down for a time,” said Lilia. “It won’t be much different.”

“No,” Viktor cut in. “I’ll go.”

“Did you not hear me?” Lilia demanded.

“If they’re going to see us — really see us, mutants, as not dangerous,” Viktor said, carefully, “they have to know us. And if we don’t come forward they never will. This is a chance to do it. Right, Yuuri?”

Yuuri looked over and saw that Viktor was looking straight at him, eyes wide.

“It’s a chance,” Yuuri said. He didn’t know enough about what had led to this moment in his own world to be entirely certain, but there was still something bright and comforting about hearing Viktor talk like this, like he had faith in people to do the right thing.

That was what he missed the most about his Viktor: how full of hope he was. How bright he believed the future could be. Yuuri had felt that lightness snuffed out in him when he’d found out that Viktor was gone, and he could feel it reigniting again as Viktor spoke.

“Then we have to take it,” Viktor said. “We’re not so different. They ought to know.”

Yuuri glanced at Yakov and found that he was looking at Yuuri rather than Viktor, evaluating.

“Alright,” Yakov said. “If you’re willing to take the risk.”

“That they will arrest me?” Viktor asked. “That they will treat me as a lab rat? That they will hurt me for the fun of it? Yes, I know they might. But if we can make them understand” — he looked at Yuuri again, as though searching for reassurance, and Yuuri held his gaze until he continued — “then maybe they won’t hurt anyone else ever again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr and [Chrome](http://pillowfort.io/Chrome/) on Pillowfort. Come say hi!
> 
> If you can, please leave a comment; they mean a lot.

**Author's Note:**

> The plan is for weekly updates, but I think they're going to need to get more frequent by the end to hit the posting deadline for this exchange, so...stay tuned while I figure out the appropriate schedule.
> 
> I'm [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. Come say hi!
> 
> And, if you can, please leave a comment; they mean a lot.


End file.
